Affirming and celebrating Humanae Vitae
July 25 is the fiftieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, Blessed Paul VI’s encyclical on the integrity of love and the appropriate means of family planning. Issued during the cultural meltdown […]
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A caveat on the great Tom Wolfe
When the great Tom Wolfe died on May 14 — he of the white suits, the spats, and the prose style as exuberant as his wardrobe — I, like millions […]
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A pastor in full
Almost a quarter-century ago, Father Jay Scott Newman, back in Rome to finish a graduate degree after his priestly ordination in Charleston, took me on an extended ramble around the […]
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The 2018 Summer Reading List
The vacation season is an opportunity to escape TwitterWorld and do some serious reading. These books will help make your summer enjoyable, instructive, or both. Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s […]
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Acts and us
The Church’s custom of reading virtually all of the Acts of the Apostles at daily Mass during the Easter season struck me as particularly apt this year, and for three […]
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Homelands and social doctrines
With hundreds of bishops coming to the Vatican in October 2001 for a Synod, I decided to spend that month in Rome conducting interviews for what would eventually become the […]
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After the Irish debacle
I wasn’t surprised by the result of Ireland’s May 25 referendum, which opened a path to legal abortion in the Emerald Isle by striking down a pro-life amendment to the […]
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Craving approval isn’t evangelization
The bizarre comment and the weird gesture have not, until recently, been associated with high-ranking churchmen. Both, alas, were on vivid display last month when Cardinals Reinhard Marx and Gianfranco […]
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Grace under pressure
A chapter in a remarkable American and Catholic life will close on June 6, when Abbot Thomas Frerking, OSB, concludes more than two decades of service as leader of the […]
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Justin Trudeau and the dictatorship of relativism
You’ve probably never heard of the Waupoos Family Farm. I hadn’t either, until I met some folks involved in it during a recent visit to Ottawa. Their story vividly illustrates […]
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The Holy See, China, and evangelization
In a recent interview, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State of the Holy See, suggested that certain critics of a deal between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China […]
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Freedom is never free
When I first visited Lviv, the principal city of western Ukraine, in 2002, the transportation from plane to airport terminal was an old bus towed by a Soviet-era tractor; today, […]
